Video: What an earthquake could do to your home aquarium

Shake, shake, shake ...

A home aquarium can be so heavy you might assume that it isn't necessary to strap it to the wall to prevent it from falling over during an earthquake. The opposite is true, as the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering recently showed in this shake-table demonstration. The demonstration was performed on behalf of the television show "Totally Unprepared."

UCSD says on its engineering blog that, "Engineers at the Powell Structural Laboratories ... placed two 60-gallon aquariums and two dummies on one of the laboratories' small shake tables. One tank was secured to the wall with $12 worth of furniture straps. The other was not. Engineers then put the whole set up through the lateral ground motion that took place during the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, which registered at 7.2 on the Richter scale. The unsecured aquarium shook and shattered, ultimately falling down on one of the dummies.

"Morale of the story: secure your aquarium."

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